"What are you going to do with them?" his neighbor, Sarah, asked, peering over a wall of faux-leather covers.

The delivery driver had laughed when he saw the single-room apartment. Elias hadn’t laughed. He had spent forty-eight hours wondering if he could be sued for "accidental evangelism" on a massive scale.

By the time the last box was opened, Elias’s apartment felt strangely empty. He looked at the spot where the bedside table used to be. He didn't need the bulk anymore. He just needed one copy—the one where Marcus had sketched a blueprint for a new beginning on the very last page.

"I'm not much of a reader," Marcus said, turning the gold-edged pages. "But the paper in these... it's thin. Good for sketching."

The cardboard boxes were stacked so high in Elias’s studio apartment that they functioned as furniture. He had a bedside table made of King James Versions and a coffee table built from New Testaments.

Two weeks ago, Elias had been tasked with a simple job for his community center: "buy bibles in bulk." But a late-night caffeine binge and a glitchy "quantity" slider on a liquidator website had turned a modest order of fifty into a shipment of five thousand.

Elias tried. He left a stack at the park; they were gone in an hour. He left a box at the bus stop; it vanished by noon. He started leaving them in "Little Free Libraries," then at the local hospital, then at the prison outreach center.